


in the light of morning

by BirdyMarie



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, M/M, Multi, Threegulls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-06 17:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16837321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BirdyMarie/pseuds/BirdyMarie
Summary: The threegulls wake in the summer and appreciate each other. Unadultered shmoop.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Moving this over here from tumblr in case I get got. I liked this one and don't want to lose it.

The summer night had been too muggy for anything but lounging around on top of the covers, talking until they fell asleep. Duke woke up staring at the scar on the bottom of Audrey’s foot. He took a moment to appreciate the rest of her, spread out gorgeous and golden above him on Nathan’s bed. She was wearing only a pair of Nathan’s boxers. So, Duke was pretty sure, was he. The thought made a soft grin spread over his face as he studied the scar, just as gorgeous as the rest of her. Without thinking, he traced it with a finger. Well. Maybe he was thinking a little of how strong Audrey’s feet and skin and the threads of her were, to hold them all together the way she did. He would always blame the tender thoughts on being barely awake. But, it was the soft bottom of her foot he touched. 

She jerked, almost kicking him square in the face. He jerked back as well, eyes going wide. He had felt her heel graze the very tip of his nose. He stayed frozen there, neck tense, heart pounding, single finger still raised in front of him.  
There was a deep chuckle from the doorway, and his eyes flicked up to find Nathan leaning there, fully dressed for the day. His sleeves were rolled up, his hands were in his pockets, there was a telltale smudge of flour on one forearm, and he looked beautiful and golden in the morning, too. 

“Hngh?” Duke said, early morning intelligent in the face of fear and beauty.  
Nathan tipped his head to lean against the doorjamb, smiling down at him. 

“You’re just…you’re cute.” It was a real smile, a soft smile that stole over his whole face and robbed attention from the rest of his glorious self, and it was directed at Duke. He surged up from the bed, could not keep himself down, and pressed kisses into Nathan’s face and smile and being until the other man was pressed against the opposite wall. Nathan, for his part, laughed. Duke ignored him, kissing down the column of his throat and tasting the flour and not caring because Nathan was laughing at him. Nathan was up making breakfast for him. He got to have and be had by Nathan. And Audrey. Who groaned from the bedroom like the morning person she was.

“You’re supposed to do that where I can watch,” she called, croaky and whiny like she got when she woke alone. Duke raised his head to meet Nathan’s dancing eyes. He smiled back, wide and unashamed and unshuttered. Audrey made all this happen. Audrey was probably his favorite person in the world, and he hated disappointing her. So he sprinted back into the bedroom and launched himself onto the bed to bounce her into the day. She landed, wide eyed and bewildered, and he kissed her soundly, too, until she was laughing, too.

“What was that for,” she purred, wriggling around until she was out from under him. They could both smell breakfast, the kiss had been for greeting and not for rousing. Duke stayed prone and shrugged one shoulder, suddenly shy. Nathan had come back to lean in the doorway, and Audrey’s eyes were bright and piercing in the morning sun streaming through Nathan’s blinds.

“I just…you gave me him back,” he rasped, talking to the sheet he was toying with instead of his partners. “You gave me him back and threw yourself into the bargain and I’m happy.” It came out in a rush; Duke was still working on being honest instead of sarcastically ironic.

And Audrey knew. She always knew when he was close to his edges, knew they would lose the moment if she pursued it. So she just smiled until he looked at her. She leaned in to kiss him, and Audrey had never mastered the art of kissing for anything -but- arousal, so Duke had to lay there for a moment and catch his breath. She only said, “You’re welcome,” and he felt so, then slid over to the chair where Duke’s flannel had landed the night before. She slid it on and left it unbuttoned. Duke had to admit, she filled it out much better than he did. He followed her movement to the door and their boyfriend, where she stretched to kiss him as well. He definitely agreed - they should always do that where they could be watched. She pulled back with a hum and a lick to her own lower lip, then continued out into the hall to head downstairs to breakfast. As she looked back to see if they were following, Duke saw a quirk to her eyebrows. Her voice trailed back into the room after she was out of sight.

“Are those even your jeans?”

Duke could hear the shrug in Nathan’s voice. “They were on top.”

He leapt up to sprint after them, not worried about clothes on, but more worried about fueling up to get them back off.


	2. a headcanon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A headcanon I didn't want to lose

I bet, after a while, Audrey and Nathan get a calendar specifically to track Duke’s movements. And they circle the dates he’s supposed to come back into port. Then, when Duke finds the calendar, he takes every different color highlighter he can find and draws hearts and stars around those dates instead. And he does it a little because he’s a sarcastic shit, but mostly because he needs to laugh to keep from crying at the thought that his two favorite people wait for him.


	3. warts and all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> another ficlet i didn't want to lose

Duke Crocker loves having their faults more than anything in the world. He has them, and no one else does, ever has, or ever will if he has his way.

He loves knowing how they dress. Audrey looks good in anything and is always perfectly put together for work, but Duke knows when she gets home her feet stink worse than both the boys’ combined. Nathan dresses sleek and svelte almost as often as Audrey, but Duke knows he haaates folding laundry and lives out of three hampers and throws the day’s outfit in the dryer to get the wrinkles out.

He loves knowing their bathroom tendencies. Duke feels a giddy swoop in his belly every time he sees Audrey’s toothbrush in his or Nathan’s or her own shower, knowing she has to keep it there or she will forget to use it until someone says her smile is turning coffee yellow. He laughs hysterically every time Nathan forgets to flush the toilet after he pees. Duke even finds gross pleasure telling them which of the more exotic animals he has known they sound like when they fart.

Even their bad leisure habits endear them to him. He doesn’t care that Audrey cracks the spines to his books or that Nathan drives up the electric bill leaving video games paused all day because he’s too lazy to find the save points before work. He loves the alert to Audrey’s approaching monthlies by the absence of last month’s cupcake wrappers that she lets sit until the next batch is needed. He loves Nathan’s syrupy dishes left on every available surface.

Because these things are his, these things no one else knows about. He is the first committed, serious, adult relationship the two of them decided to pursue, despite his own flaws. And that knowledge, that level of trust and acceptance, is the greatest treasure of them all.


	4. Audrey Parker dislikes flowers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just found this one hiding in some other stuff, adding it onto the pile of things i don't want to lose. oh this was from an audrey night! Cool.

Audrey Parker dislikes flowers.

Everything else about being a woman, Audrey enjoys, even revels in. She loves the physicalities of it. She loves fitting her lush curves to the hard lines of her men. She loves their long fingers in the heavy fall of her thick hair. She loves how her plump lips envelop theirs, how their large hands cup her soft jawline. She is proud of her breasts and how they bring her men to their knees. She absolutely loves the slick folds and hypersensitivity of her sex. She would enjoy that on her own, without the boys to contrast.

She also has perfectly feminine behavioral indulgences, like actually wearing outfits that make fashion sense and hiding her face in cupcakes when she feels sad and taking her bra off as soon as her door shuts behind her on her day. She reads romance novels. She wants to get dolled up and be shown off on dates. She wants to be -asked- on dates.

And that date better show up with chocolates, and not flowers.

It boggles her mind a little, realizing how much her boys like flowers. But Nathan’s favorite texture (after her skin) has always been the undersides of petals, and Duke buys himself flowers for the galley of the Rouge all the time. Audrey knows these are the men she wants to spend the rest of her life with when neither of them scoff the first time she brings them a bouquet each before one of their dates.

She does, of course, rethink these life choices halfway through the Great Prank War of 2015 when the boys retaliate against her filling both their offices floor to ceiling with balloons by filling her new Jeep entirely with rose petals. But that’s a story for a different time.


	5. in the dark of night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i just keep finding them. this one was languishing in my notes, i don't even know if i ever posted it anywhere. presented as found, mostly incomplete.

Anyway. So there's a bad cold going around the Gull staff, and Duke has to jump in one night as a closer. And because he's the owner he ends up micromanaging the closing and counting down and tallying and cleaning, but makes up for it with a round of shift drinks. It's a good night. He makes it a good night because he knows, now that it's oh-dark-thirty (and God how he'll never forgive them for making him think in military time fuckiNG COPS), he has missed the conscientious window for bedtime sex with the early birds he's in love with. But when he gets upstairs to the apartment, the glow of the bedside lamp is showing from the far back.

He steps past the bead curtain, mouth open, drawing breath to coo soft words at them and coax them down for the night, and is frozen stock-still by what he sees. So that's the matter. 

Audrey's fingers trace knots and figure eights around the three scars on Nathan's back. In the middle of their dance, sometimes they lay flat and bump over all three. When Duke finally swallows, his throat clicks and Nathan closes his eyes. Audrey looks over and meets Duke's. She doesn't look overly distressed, just...off. He raises his chin at her hand. "I do the same thing, sometimes," he rasps. 

"It's just...I wasn't there," she says, in her overtime voice, the same one that says this ends here and we won't waste anymore time apart and we'll find the answers. The one that can't be dissuaded from following the path her mind is on until it's done. 

He eases down onto the edge of the bed and reaches to rest his hand over hers, on top of what he knows to be the final bullet hole. "I get it. I was." 

The only thing that allows him to smile gently down at her is Nathan's arm snaking around his waist. "We're all here now," the other man finally says. It's easiest for him to say, having been the one to lose instead of the one lost. But Duke can see what passes behind Audrey's eyes. And he looks back with understanding. After all, he too lays awake some nights, tracing the bullet holes in his love's back, and marveling at just how much pain he has put this precious man through.


End file.
